They’re probably going to focus on the more effects-heavy episodes for this movie, but they really shouldn’t; The Twilight Zone was about the writing, not the effects, thanks partially to its low budget. With that in mind, here are our choices for episodes a new movie should tackle.

Night Call

This deserves a shot not least because this episode, directed by horror legend Jacques Tourneur and written by Richard Matheson, got screwed by history not once, but twice: The first time when it was delayed due to the Kennedy assassination, the second time by being put against the freaking Beatles. But this powerful story of regret, stubbornness, and tragedy really deserves a second shot. Plus, it’s creepy as hell, which helps.

A Kind Of Stopwatch

The nasty karmic irony The Twilight Zone was so well known for was never nastier than in this episode, probably one of the best horror stories the franchise ever produced. A boring pill of a human being is given a stopwatch that, much to his surprise, stops time; needless to say, owning such a fancy gadget soon bites him, hard. If the concept sounds familiar, the idea has lingered everywhere from Simpsons spoofs to Mario power-ups.

Miniature

The original episode, about a man obsessed with a living dollhouse, was largely carried by a superb performance by Robert Duvall. Thanks to a lawsuit, it was largely kept out of the public eye, but it’s a great showcase for an actor, and it’d also be fun to see what modern special effects could do for the story.

The Jeopardy Room

OK, so you’ll have to change the title and probably the details a bit: The idea of the Soviets hunting down a Cold War defector is a wee bit dated. On the other hand, having a man trapped in a room with a bomb he can’t find, sweating it out, is always a fun story and, again, a showcase for a good actor.

Person Or Persons Unknown

The Twilight Zone, as a show, was arguably at its best when dealing with issues of identity and depersonalization, and this is a killer example of both. It’s a pretty classic story: A man wakes up and nobody knows who he is, but they’re happy to lock him up in an asylum for insisting he exists when he obviously doesn’t.

Of course, this will probably just be Nightmare at 20,000 Feet rehashed with Vin Diesel, where he fights the Gremlin on the wing of the plane, but hey, we can dream.

“The Howling Man” could be very interesting. They could use the movie format to show David Ellington hunting down the devil throughout history (it was obviously truncated for a TV show) and then end in much the same way the original did. I’ll even cast the thing for Hollywood. Hugh Jackman plays Ellington, John Malkovich plays The Howling Man and Brother Jerome could easily be played by Christoph Waltz. Throw in a brief Shatner cameo as homage to his early days on the show and you’ve got a movie.

Screw all that jazz, I want to see a Rod Serling Biopic, dude was a total badass. Fought in these extremely dangerous campiagn in the Phillipines during WW2, fought McCarthyism,smoked like a chimney.forget this retread crap.

With that aside, I’d still recommend “The Dummy” (because dummies = creepy), “The Grave” (because old west horror is fun), and “Will the real martian please stand up” (because the premise was good but the sfx for aliens desperately need an update).

Anthology movies are one of my favorite type of movies and I so wish that they’d make a comeback. My favorite episodes are the one with the old hillbilly who dies while coon hunting with his dog Rip and Rip manages to keep him out of Hell because dogs aren’t allowed, the one where an older man is married to a shallow young woman and he drinks an elixir to make him young but ends up turning him into a toddler with his wife left to look after him, the one during the end of the civil war with the widow watching all the soldiers limping past and it turns out to be the road of the dead with Abraham Lincoln being the last victim of the war. But my absolute favorite is “Number 12 Looks Just Like You.”